1099: Tuesdays

Beret Guy and at least one other person (Megan) are sitting at a restaurant. The waitress, Ponytail, tells Beret Guy there is a special on Tuesdays for "endless wings". Restaurants often have different daily discounts to encourage people to come in. In a normal restaurant, "endless wings" would presumably refer to "all-you-can-eat" chicken wings, meaning the customer can pay a flat price and eat all the chicken wings they want without having to pay any more.

However, in this comic, instead of ordering them by telling the waitress: "I'll have those", Beret Guy tells her: "I have those", meaning that he already has literal "endless wings" (similar issues of things being taken literally are referenced in 1086: Eyelash Wish Log and 1528: Vodka), and then begins to grow wings which ultimately appear "endless" as they grow to a span of at least the circumference of the Earth by the last panel (and presumably continue growing). The other characters scream in horror for obvious[citation needed] reasons.

The title text plays on another common restaurant offer of "bottomless drinks", meaning unlimited free refills of drinks. However, falling into something literally bottomless (i.e. without a bottom) would result in falling forever. (However, even this is unlikely unless the diameter of the cups that the drinks are served in is large enough to fit a whole person into.) If it was literally "bottomless", you would start to decelerate as you pass the earth's center of mass. The air pressure and heat in a "bottomless" pit would also be fatal to humans.

This is one of the few comics since the xkcd lettering became inked and standardized as all-caps that lowercase lettering has been used (including the word "i" which would normally be capitalized). In this case, the usage may be to denote a whisper or soft voice.

Discussion

Presumably you could stay afloat if it was the drink itself that was bottomless. 76.122.5.96 23:46, 29 August 2012 (UTC)

Hmmm, as a non-native English user I have understood the "endless wings" expression as chicken wings having their ends (tips) cut off. The tips of the wings often get over-crispy when fried. --89.174.214.74 14:38, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

In this usage, "endless" means "unlimited" or "free refills" or "all you can eat" and not "physically without ends". English is an "interesting" language, even for native speakers. --B. P. (talk) 20:08, 20 September 2012 (UTC)

May I pedantically point out that our hero's wings do have ends... Each has one end at least at its wingtip, even if it appears they are both unlimited in the distance from that wingtip to the unknown attachment to his back (and that attachment, or feed mechanism, hides a potentially unlimited amount of wing by unknown means, leaving them without another end). A "hoop" of wing (or arbitrary size, and not necessarily excessively so) would be endless... I've made paper planes with that sort of idea behind their 'wing' surface, and there's at least one 'perpendicular frisbee-like' thing out there in the toy shops. (Mobius wings could also be imagined, often being thought of as more "endless" than a simple non-mobius belt, but I'm sure they'd actually be worse at flight.)

Secondly, I've recently heard the term "bottomless cup" being commented on by a comedian (I forget who) who has asserted that that's "just a tube". But that's at best merely a related bit of observational/absurdist comedy, and not really relevant to the given comic. 178.98.141.216 13:44, 31 March 2013 (UTC)

Note how the girl on the right, presumably Megan, does not start screaming until the wings start increasing in size...
Superslash9 (talk) 20:54, 16 January 2014 (UTC)

As far as I have seen, this is the only comic with lowercase letters in dialog ("i have those.") Perhaps a category is in order if there is more? 173.245.52.154 18:11, 21 August 2014 (UTC)

Tools

It seems you are using noscript, which is stopping our project wonderful ads from working. Explain xkcd uses ads to pay for bandwidth, and we manually approve all our advertisers, and our ads are restricted to unobtrusive images and slow animated GIFs. If you found this site helpful, please consider whitelisting us.